Secure track and trace is a well known concept for securing a supply chain, from the manufacturer to the consumer, against counterfeiting and other fraudulent activities. Counterfeiting affects both the manufacturer and the public. E.g. in the field of pharmaceuticals, fake medicines may have no effect, or they can have dangerous side effects.
Due to lack of knowledge and control from proper authorities, corrupt and vicious business operators may gain access to supply chains, flooding them with dangerous products. Due to the prospects of high profit in the area of counterfeiting and the resources invested into the counterfeiting business by the swindlers, it can be hard to differentiate or detect counterfeited products and businesses dealing with unsafe products from legal products and businesses.
The modus operandi of a secure track and trace system according to background art is to actively include and protect the parties operating legally in the supply chain and exclude all others.
A secure track and trace system is surveying and managing all goods having been marked and registered with a unique identifier, and at the same time controlling all parties allowed to handle the products, all the way from the manufacture to the end consumer.
Predominately a secure track and trace system controls and assigns responsibly of the handling of the market and registered goods to a possessor.
By default unmarked products are unsafe and will not be allowed to enter the supply chain, and further any unregistered party is unable to be responsible for any marked goods.
Track and trace systems according to background art works in the way that product items and associated transportation units are marked with a unique identifier. This identifier is then utilized to authenticate the product in the supply chain. If the authentication process has a positive outcome, i.e. the product and code has been determined to be genuine, additional information related to the product and the present stage of the supply chain may be recorded and stored for later retrieval and analysis. The pivotal information that is recorded during the addition of a new tracking record is the identity of the product or transportation unit, the location and the time and also information about the operator. If available, the devices and method by which the product was authenticated. as well as other circumstantial information may also be recorded in the tracking record.
This series of tracking records recorded by the track and trace system will result in a complete history of the handling of the product in the supply chain, that might be presented at any time for security or other purposes.
Secure track and trace can be seen as a practical embodiment of the following 4W pillars; At all times it must be known (a) which products are located (b) where, (c) when they got there and conveyed/received by (d) whom, all considered in that order of significance
The logical and practical consequence of this postulate is that accountability for the parties being part of the supply chain can be controlled and also transferred in a controlled manner. Tracking is the process and result of a series of authentications respecting the 4W postulate.
The enforcement of this postulate has two main impacts; a) it prevents counterfeited goods to enter the secured supply chain and b) it detects “leakage” and “doctoring” of genuine products for illegal handling and intentions. Diversion, illegitimate handling and dealing with genuine products is easily detected.
The management of tracking information by the use of a unique code, often referred to as the product identification code (PID), has traditionally been managed by the use of a database system, such as Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). For some manufacturing plants the number of products produced and the corresponding number of unique codes become extremely large, e.g. in the order of 1012. One of the problems with databases is that for very large numbers of unique codes the performance needed to provide an acceptable level of system response time has found to be to unpredictable as well as inadequate. In fact conventional database technologies have not been designed for this type of application. The most prominent shortcoming of the database is the generation of unique codes, often in relation or as a feed from a pseudo random number generator, whereby the database (system) for every single new PID proposed, must reference or search amongst the already existing PID's to control and determine that the the proposed PID has not been issued before in order to preserve and guarantee code uniqueness amongst the complete code population. In most database systems this concept is known as a primary key check. Partitioning of databases is possible, but does not solve the problem of having to manage an index for large amounts of data.
European patent EP1719070B1 (Sagar et al) describes a system where manufactured goods are marked or labelled with a secure unique identifier being a unique product identifier code digitally signed by means of a secret derived from a plurality of secret codes. A central checking centre allows users to verify the authenticity of a particular good such as a cigarette pack or carton via any convenient interface such as the Internet or a cell phone. Sharing of a secret code allows authentication of each item.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,442,276 B1 discloses a method and system for verifying the authenticity of goods that includes generating one or more random codes and storing the one or more random codes in a database. The goods are then marked with one of the generated random codes such that each of the goods contain their own unique random code. Upon field checking and inventory of marked goods and comparing the codes on the marked goods to codes within the database, the authenticity of goods may be verified.
International patent application WO0023954A1 discloses a method of verifying the authenticity of goods, wherein a set of public data (4, 6, 8) and security code (10) are applied to the goods (2), the security code having been derived from the public data by means of a predetermined encryption algorithm. Upon receiving a request for verification, the public data (4, 6, 8) applied to the goods (2) is entered into the predetermined encryption algorithm to generate a verification code. The verification code is then compared with the security code (10) applied to the goods to assess the authenticity of goods.
International application WO2006/092544 describes a method for marking packed articles in a packaging hierarchy.
US patent application US2006/0100964 A1 describes how to provide a product with a product specific identification sequence, which is coded into a check sequence using a secret encoding sequence. The product can be authenticated by decoding the check sequence.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,442,276 B1 discloses a method of verifying the authenticity of goods including generating one or more random codes and storing the codes in a database.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,775,422 B1 discloses a storage system for paper and electronic documents. The records of a database uniquely identifies the physical locations of the paper and electronic documents.
International patent application WO 02/073551 A1 describes a system for tracking articles with an article number and verifying the authenticity of the articles. Articles are packed into containers and a database is provided for storing the article numbers and the corresponding container number.